The good doctor

In Bright Particular Stars, David McKie examines the impact of twenty-six remarkable British eccentrics on twenty-six unremarkable British locations.

From Broadway in the Cotswolds, where the Victorian bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps nurtured dreams of possessing every book in the world, to Kilwinning in Scotland, where in 1839 the Earl of Eglinton mounted a tournament that was Renaissance in its extravagance and disastrous in its execution, McKie leads us to places transformed, inspired and sometimes scandalized by the obsessional endeavours of visionary mavericks.

As David McKie recaptures here in vivid and beguiling fashion, the triumphs and failures of the visionaries who thus reformed these quiet, unassuming streetscapes into sites of eccentric and uproarious action have each, in their own way, helped shape our island's rich and chequered history.